Ed Batista

Extending Your Personal Runway

When a company isn't yet profitable, leadership is always keenly aware of their runway. The amount of cash at their disposal net ongoing expenses will determine the length of time they can continue to operate before something has to change: achieving profitability, raising additional capital, major cost-cutting, or ceasing operations. A theme in my practice is the leader who's assessing their "personal runway," which isn't quite as easy to calculate but has similar implications: There's a limited amount of time that they can sustain the status quo before something has to change.

My clients typically begin a coaching engagement occupying a leadership role that they expect to hold for the foreseeable future. But we work together for relatively long periods of time, so it's not uncommon for me to talk with a client about the possibility of a professional transition. In some cases this is a result of a change in the business, such as a potential sale to an acquirer or a major shift in strategy.

But just as often there's a change in my client, and they unexpectedly find themselves staring down the runway, wondering how far it extends. They're not planning to leave suddenly--which would be neither feasible nor desirable--but they've realized that they have a finite capacity to continue in their current role, and they're unsure how much time they'll have before they feel compelled to act.

Why does this happen so often? Senior leaders do enjoy many advantages: They're well-compensated, have a great deal of autonomy, and often feel a strong sense of purpose. But such roles also come with significant downsides. Senior leaders are the subject of intense scrutiny, receive little developmental feedback, and are rarely viewed empathetically by others. [1] So despite the many benefits of these roles, feelings of stress, fatigue and isolation can cause senior leaders to entertain thoughts of leaving.

If you're a senior leader and this resonates with you, what can you do about it? My work with clients in this area involves what we might call "extending your personal runway": Taking steps that will enable you to remain in the role long enough to engineer a desirable transition, rather than feeling obligated to make a suboptimal move. (Most of my clients are CEOs, and there are some factors that apply specifically to that role, but many of the issues I address here are relevant for anyone in a leadership position.)

 

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Get Support

I'm biased, of course, but consider working with an executive coach. This need not be "career coaching," which involves helping you source and obtain a new role, should you choose to pursue one. It may be useful simply to have a trusted thought partner who understands the complexities of your role while remaining independent from the company. [2]

A personal coach can play a special role as a dedicated professional, but they're just one potential member of your "coaching team." There are undoubtedly other people already in your life or within reach who can also serve as sources of support, but you have to identify them--and understand the limits on the support they can provide. Family members and friends may be eager to help, but they may not fully grasp the challenges you face--and your need to talk about these challenges may exhaust their capacity to be present. In addition, cultivate relationships with peers--not just friends, but other senior leaders in similar roles. [3] The key in all of these relationships is letting the other party know what you need--people are often quick to jump in with advice, when you may just want to unburden yourself to an empathetic listener. [4]

A sometimes overlooked source of support is a truly outstanding executive assistant. If you don't have one, why not? As I've noted before, "a CEO who's spending time on tasks that could be delegated to an EA isn't being 'lean and scrappy'--they're stubbornly clinging to an outdated job description and hurting the business as a result." [5] Or perhaps you have a shared EA, or an "EA/office manager" for whom the role is merely a stepping stone to something better. In my experience when a leader finally finds a "professional EA" who views the role as a career path, the leader is not only much more effective, they're also far less stressed.

Finally, assess your finances. You needn't be motivated primarily by money to feel a heightened sense of opportunity cost as your tenure in a role lengthens. Perhaps your base compensation hasn't kept pace with the market, or a lack of liquidity is imposing constraints that are no longer palatable, or you're fully vested with no refresh on the calendar. We fail to obtain the financial support we need for many different reasons, but a common dilemma is the expectation that the necessary conversations will be uncomfortable or fraught. This may be true, but as I've noted before, "If it feels risky to say, saying it will carry a short-term cost [and] NOT saying it will carry a long-term cost." [6] I'm not suggesting that all you need to do is ask--you may face substantial resistance. But we don't get what we deserve--we get what we negotiate. [7] And a reluctance to thoroughly explore the possibilities will almost certainly shorten your personal runway.

 

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Redefine Your Role

Your current responsibilities were determined at a particular point in your company's evolution and in your own growth and development as a leader. Some of the stress and fatigue you feel today are likely the result of gaps that have emerged over time among A) the tasks you do because they're "your job," B) the tasks you do that create the most value, and C) the tasks you find most fulfilling. While you undoubtedly face constraints in re-defining your role, all too often I see leaders laboring under outdated job descriptions that should be updated--and this is as true of CEOs as it is of anyone else. It's important to distinguish between the value you create through specific tasks and the extent to which those tasks are personally fulfilling:

This is obviously an oversimplified version of reality, and there are probably few, if any, neat and tidy divisions among your duties that correlate perfectly with this model--but it may still highlight some useful distinctions. As I've noted before, "I define 'work' as a vocation--a calling or a personal mission that provides us with an intrinsic sense of meaning and purpose. A 'job,' in contrast, is a set of responsibilities we fulfill in exchange for various forms of compensation. We get paid to do the job, but the work is its own reward." [8]

If you're like many senior leaders these categories overlap substantially but have drifted apart in recent months or years, which may be one of the primary reasons you're considering the length of your runway. Almost certainly there are a set of tasks that you find unfulfilling but through which you generate so much value that it's unrealistic to consider delegating or abandoning them, at least at present. You may conclude that this is The Job, i.e. the reason you get paid. But what's in the top-right quadrant? What responsibilities are both value-generating and fulfilling? And what might enable you to operate here as much as possible?

At the same time, there are almost certainly a set of responsibilities are are neither value-generating nor personally fulfilling, although perhaps they were in the past. A cynic might say, "This is The Job--this is why I get paid." But in my experience that's not true for senior leaders who enjoy a degree of control and agency in their work (although it may well be for people in other roles in dysfunctional bureaucracies.) Instead, senior leaders typically find themselves performing these tasks either because they have an outdated idea of the value being created, or they've placed insufficient value on their time and attention. Once these factors are recalculated, it can be surprisingly easy to...stop.

To help assess your current role in light of this model, here are three questions to ask (which I've discussed at greater length previously [9]):

1. What are you uniquely qualified to do?

This is likely a function of the talent you can attract and retain at present. You probably own certain responsibilities because no one better qualified is available, and efforts to delegate these tasks will have to wait. But consider whether you're holding on to these responsibilities because of an outdated belief that certain tasks are too important to delegate, a counterproductive need to maintain personal oversight, or difficulties in building scalable systems. Your unique qualifications may be less expansive than you think.

2. What are you obligated to do?

All leadership roles come with some responsibilities that can't be delegated, no matter how talented your team or successful the company. But while these tasks may well be yours as long as you hold the role, it's often the case that as the company grows and your role becomes more prominent, the stakes will be higher, requiring more thorough preparation and a greater amount of your attention. Consider how narrowing the focus of your role might allow you to perform these duties more effectively and efficiently.

3. What are you free to do?

I'm not suggesting that you should prioritize personal preferences over organizational imperatives--this is not an excuse to hold on to responsibilities that should be delegated. But in addition to the work that you're uniquely qualified to do, and the work that you're obligated to do, consider what work you're free to do, what tasks might lift your spirits and make the job more intrinsically rewarding. Some of this will be value-generating, while some will simply be play--and although we may need to impose limits on the amount of play in our professional lives, a little goes a long way toward making stressful and fatiguing experiences more sustainable.

 

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Slow Down

Whatever steps you can take to extend your personal runway, it's also worthwhile to examine the forces that are causing you to accelerate toward its endpoint. It may be possible to slow down and lengthen your tenure in the process. Here are three factors that may be propelling you forward:

1. Inadequate Boundaries

If you're like many of my clients, you're not necessarily seeking "work/life balance," but at the same time, you're disinclined to devote the same amount of time and energy to work as you did in the past. This can result from many factors: Increasingly complex personal obligations, such as the needs of children, aging parents, a spouse or partner; or diminished personal well-being, ranging from the typical ailments of middle age to serious health issues. Or you may simply feel discontented or bored--the passion that once fueled your appetite for work has waned.

But while balance may be unattainable or even undesirable, you will almost certainly benefit from better boundaries. A healthy boundary isn't an impermeable barrier, but, like a cell membrane, it keeps the right things in the right places in the right proportions, while altering its permeability to adjust to changing conditions. As I've noted before, "Temporal boundaries designate certain times exclusively for family, friends, exercise, and other non-work pursuits... Physical boundaries ensure that we get out of our offices and workplaces at regular intervals and create actual distance between us and our work (which includes not only the office itself but also all our professional tools and artifacts–laptops, tablets, phones, papers, everything) [and] cognitive boundaries help us resist the temptation to think about work and focus our attention on the people or activity at hand." [10]

2. A Sense of Urgency

In this context it's important to distinguish between importance and urgency, which I define as follows:

Important activities are truly meaningful and fulfilling--to you, to the people who matter to you, to your organization, or to some cause that you believe in. They’re not necessarily time-dependent; they can be accomplished almost anytime, and if they go undone for a short stretch no one may even notice.

Urgent activities have a deadline attached to them that matters to someone—although not necessarily to you. They are time-dependent, at least in someone’s mind, and if they go undone that someone is going to be unhappy. They’re not necessarily meaningful or fulfilling, and accomplishing them may not actually make a significant difference. [11]

The dilemma, of course, is that "the time and attention we would otherwise devote to Important But Not Urgent activities is often sacrificed to address Unimportant But Urgent matters. The challenge is that we’re the only ones who care about the former, while the latter have many advocates." [12] You'll accelerate when you allow others' sense of urgency to dictate your priorities--and you'll slow down when you commit to such important-but-never-urgent activities as time with loved ones, a mindfulness routine, a workout, a good night's sleep.

3. Your Competitive Drive

Humans evolved to compare ourselves to others, to have a keen sense of our relative status, and to compete for resources and opportunities. We can't turn off these drives, nor would we want to. As with so many other confounding aspects of our psychology, they're features for the species that as individuals we often experience as bugs. [13] Even if you don't feel overtly competitive, if you're like many of my clients your sense of disenchantment with your current role is related to a perception that you're behind in some way--lagging after peers, classmates, siblings, or (most importantly) your own expectations.

The feeling of being behind inevitably provokes an urge to accelerate--you must catch up with whoever (or whatever) you're trailing--which will shorten your runway, potentially leading you to make suboptimal choices. There's no simple solution, but a starting point is considering the possibility that your competitive drive and the threat of loss that exacerbates it are, at least in part, illusions. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that you should accept your current situation or stop striving to improve it.

But a counterpart to our proclivity for social comparison is the process of hedonic adaptation: We readily accommodate and soon take for granted changes in our circumstances. [14] The things we think will make us happy rarely make us as happy as we think they will, and the happiness they bring never lasts as long as we want it to. This is not a reason to stop trying to change your life for the better, but it may allow you to view your present condition with more equanimity, and to pursue your hopes for the future without rushing to get there.

 

This is a companion piece to Not Every End Is a Goal (On Midlife Malaise).

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Footnotes

[1] Watch That Next Step (CEO Problems)

[2] How to Find (and Choose) a Coach

[3] The Friendship of Wolves

[4] What Do You Need Right Now? (Advice, Listening, A Hug?)

[5] Three Stages of Executive Assistance

[6] Risk Management (The Importance of Speaking Up)

[7] Negotiating with Your Own Side

[8] The Work and The Job

[9] Three Buckets (On CEO Job Descriptions)

[10] Happy Workaholics Need Boundaries, Not Balance

[11] Importance vs. Urgency

[12] Ibid.

[13] The Trap of Competition

[14] Stop Trying to Be "Good Enough" By "Getting Better"

Photo by Victor.

Pain Is Mandatory. Suffering Is Optional.

At last you cry out in anguish: "Why me?" God answers: "Why not?"

You can so stand it.

After all, it's only pain.

What makes it seem unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.

~Sheldon Kopp, 1979 [1]

Legal cases often involve damages for "pain and suffering" to compensate people for the wrongs they've been subjected to. But I think it's useful to distinguish between the two terms and regard them as different aspects of the human experience. In this context, pain is mandatory. It isn't just on the menu--it comes with every order, and we can't send it back. But suffering is optional. It's something we choose, although often without realizing it.

Pain is mandatory for a number of reasons. First, it's needed to keep us safe. We identify sources of physical and psychological pain very early in life, and (usually) we learn to avoid them. There are people with genetic mutations who don't feel pain, and such a condition might sound enviable until we learn that these people constantly break bones and burn themselves without even realizing it. [2] An inability to feel pain is incredibly dangerous, and we can readily grasp why the capacity for pain conferred an evolutionary advantage on our distant ancestors.

Pain results from our nature as organic beings who are prone to physical frailty. We tend to forget this aspect of life until it becomes impossible to ignore it. If we're fortunate, our experience with painful injuries and health issues are delayed, but a hidden cost of that good fortune is the mistaken belief that we've somehow been spared this fate. (My friend and colleague Joe Dunn has observed that in our 40s we slowly become "old young people," and in our 50s we're suddenly "young old people," and that's a perfect description of my last decade.)

Pain is a by-product of the inadequacy we feel when we compare ourselves to others. Neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman has suggested that whenever we're not preoccupied with a specific task, our brains rely upon a "default network" whose focus is "social cognition [which entails] thinking about other people, oneself, and the relationship of oneself to other people." [3] As a result, psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky has noted that "it's impossible not to compare ourselves with others... Social comparisons arise naturally, automatically, and effortlessly." [4]

And pain springs from the fact that we're finite creatures with infinite psychological appetites. Anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Becker observed that "the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic," and our symbolic selves are essentially bottomless pits of need. [5] Our craving for attention, our acquisitive impulses, even our sexual drive are all manifestations of a futile but determined effort to transcend mortality, and are thus reliable sources of pain when we inevitably fall short of our yearnings and aspirations. [6]

In contrast, suffering is a consequence of how we view our pain. Suffering can magnify pain, making it worse and more intense. And suffering can extend pain, transforming it from an aspect of life that comes and goes into a continuous state, or even a way of being. But we can be deliberate and intentional in deciding how to view our pain, and in that sense suffering is optional.

We choose to suffer when we fail to learn from experience and identify sources of pain that might be avoided in the future. This can be a particular challenge for extreme optimists, who may seek to suppress negative emotions associated with setbacks. [7] But at various times we're all subject to a tendency to discount or ignore these feelings, and yet in so doing we condemn ourselves to repeat the same mistakes. Instead, we can accept and learn from our failures.

We choose to suffer when we strive for permanence in a fleeting and transient existence. There's an apt line of scripture inscribed upon the Buland Darwaza, an immense gateway near Agra, India, built in 1575 by the Mughal emperor Akbar: "The world is a bridge. Cross it, but build no house upon it. The world endures for but an hour. Spend it in devotion. The rest is unseen." [8] Whatever our spiritual beliefs, we can acknowledge that our efforts in this existence are impermanent, and rather than resist the inescapable, we can embrace mortality.

We choose to suffer when we cling to control and refuse to accept limits on our agency. We can take substantial steps to influence many aspects of experience, including our subjective sense of well-being, but those efforts will not protect us from pain. [9] As the Buddhist author Pema Chödrön has noted, "Sooner or later, we're going to have an experience that we can't control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we're going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head." [10] Rather than fruitlessly insisting on total control, we can seek out pockets of agency.

And we choose to suffer when we imagine that we should be free from pain. It's understandable that we might wish to eliminate the sources of pain noted above, but we should also consider the gifts that accompany the pain they bequeath us. Physical pain teaches us to stay safe and free from harm. The pain of mortality is what makes this existence meaningful. The pain of falling short in our comparison with others and in our own self-assessment keeps us moving forward, a state that is undoubtedly a "feature" for the species, even if we as individuals experience it as a "bug." The idea that we might enjoy these gifts painlessly is a form of magical thinking.

I'm not suggesting that we should cease efforts to alleviate pain, our own or that of others. But as psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp was keenly aware, our "mistaken belief that it can be cured" is what makes pain unbearable.

 

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Footnotes

[1] What Took You So Long? (Sheldon Kopp and Claire Flanders, 1979)

• On page 60 of Joan Tollifson's 2019 memoir, Death: The End of Self-Improvement, she attributes a similar line to her teacher Charlotte Joko Beck, but fails to provide a source. This seems worth noting (if only to recommend Tollifson's deeply moving and very funny book), but I'll continue to credit Kopp, as the line is certainly consistent with his overall philosophy.

[2] A family in Italy doesn't feel pain because of a gene mutation. (Jessica Hamzelou, NewScientist, 2017)

[3] Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, page 18 (Matthew Lieberman, 2013)

[4] The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn't, What Shouldn't Make You Happy, but Does, pages 131-132 (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2014)

[5] The Denial of Death, page 26 (Ernest Becker, 1974)

[6] Sex, Fame, Money and Death

[7] The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them (Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley, 2012)

[8] For more on the Buland Darwaza, see the British Library's Online Gallery and this Guardian review of Tarif Khalidi's The Muslim Jesus by William Dalyremple (2001). The latter two sources use the same translation found on Wikipedia, but I prefer the slightly different version quoted by historian Michael Woods in Episode 2 of his epic series Legacy: The Origins of Civilization (2002).

[9] Attitude and Behavior

[10] When Things Fall Apart, page 70 (Pema Chödrön, 1997)

 

For Further Reading

The Ruling Out of Possibilities (On Failure)

Not Every End Is a Goal (On Midlife Malaise)

Pockets of Agency

The Traps We Set for Ourselves

 

Photo by Matthew Rutledge.

Relating to Our Inner Critics

A theme in my practice is helping a client renegotiate their relationship with their inner critic, and I've developed a set of principles that guide our work together on this topic:

• Our inner critic has our best interests at heart.
• And until now they've served us well.
• But our life has changed since they first emerged, as have we.
• So their guidance is increasingly unhelpful.
• But efforts to banish them will generate fierce resistance.
• The solution: Renegotiate the relationship.

What do I mean by all this? And how can we put these ideas into practice?

Our inner critic has our best interests at heart.

We often apply disapproving labels to our inner critic such as "gremlin" or "saboteur." There can certainly be value to this approach, not only because it allows us to establish a sense of distance from this aspect of ourselves and view it more objectively, but also because it helps us envision and personify our inner critic, which is helpful in engaging it in a dialogue. But a problem with these labels is that they presume an antagonistic relationship, and in my experience the opposite is far more common: Our inner critic desperately wants us to succeed. It may be hopelessly misguided or tragically inept, but rather than deliberately seeking to undermine us, it has our best interests at heart. By assuming good intentions, we can engage our inner critic far more productively.

And until now they've served us well.

The paradox is that until our inner critic became an obstacle to be overcome, it served a useful purpose in our lives. It motivated us to raise our aspirations and do better work. It encouraged us to shake off complacency and try harder. It protected us from embarrassing oversights and fateful missteps. This was often unpleasant, of course--inner critics aren't known for their subtlety or tact. They probably used harsh language or employed crude tactics, such as reminding us of the cost of failure and stoking our fears and anxieties. But in the initial stages of our life and career when our inner critic first emerged, this may have been the only way we knew how to motivate ourselves.

But our life has changed since they first emerged, as have we.

And yet we're no longer at the outset of our life and career, nor are we the same person we once were. The irony is that our inner critic may have played a significant role in this evolution. By motivating, encouraging and protecting us in an earlier era, our inner critic enabled us to tackle new challenges and alter our circumstances, and in the process we became a different person. We're more capable and thus more confident. We feel a greater sense of agency and control. We're less fearful and anxious. Our inner critic may even go silent for while--until, suddenly, they come roaring back to life. If we've grown used to their absence, this can be profoundly confusing and alienating: Who is this critical voice in my head, and why are they so negative?

So their guidance is increasingly unhelpful.

This is the root of the problem: Inner critics aren't particularly flexible or responsive to change. They emerged in response to a particular set of challenges at a particular time in our life, and they developed their motivational repertoire in that context. But even as they enabled our own evolution, their limited perspective has prevented them from evolving in turn. This is entirely predictable--our inner critic is, of course, an aspect of our own personality that we differentiated from our conscious self at a time of need to serve a specific purpose. Having done so, we relied upon our inner critic to play their part in the pursuit of our own growth and development. We valued the results they helped to bring about, but we didn't like how they made us feel, and so we kept our distance whenever possible, leading them to stagnate.

But efforts to banish them will generate fierce resistance.

The dilemma that although our inner critic works for us, they have lifetime job security. Any attempts to fire them will be futile and counter-productive. This is a function of our inner critic's lack of sophistication, noted above. They can't grasp that we've evolved to the point where their guidance is no longer needed, and thus they interpret efforts to dislodge them as signs that we're about to make a grave mistake. Red alert! they shriek in protest. The more we try to ignore them, the more agitated they become. This is usually the point at which a client raises the issue with me.

The solution: Renegotiate the relationship.

The starting point in this process is exploring the points above. They're not all equally valid for everyone, of course--we're dealing in metaphors and archetypes here. But I've found most of them resonate with people in one way or another, which normalizes their struggle and allows them to relax. And once we've acknowledged that our inner critic has our best interests at heart and has served us well, but their approach is increasingly out-of-date and unhelpful, we can stop fighting our inner critic and begin collaborating with them. Rather than demonize our inner critic for its shortcomings, we can adopt a more compassionate stance toward them--which, of course, means being more compassionate toward ourselves. Our inner critic is doing the best it can--as are we.

Most inner critics emerge as authority figures--when personifying our inner critic, many of us see or hear a parent, a teacher, an athletic coach, an early manager. So it's understandable that in a previous era our inner critic took charge, and we deferred to them. They claimed the seat at the head of the table, and we assumed that they deserved it. But today that arrangement no longer meets our needs. Rather than try to exclude them altogether, we can invite them to take their rightful place. Rather than feel hectored and oppressed by them, we can appreciate their efforts on our behalf. Rather than seek to ignore them, we can engage them on our own terms. Someday we may even be able to thank them for their service and convince them to take some well-deserved time off.

 

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For Further Reading

Doing the Work (Reflection, Journaling, Dialogue)

The Traps We Set for Ourselves

Why Change Is Hard

The Obstacle Is The Way

Stop Trying to Be "Good Enough" by "Getting Better"

 

Photo by Craig Oppenheimer.

The Traps We Set for Ourselves

Sometimes we're prevented from achieving our goals by factors beyond our control--the performance of a competitor, or the misdeeds of an adversary, or simply random chance and bad luck. But all too often we pay insufficient attention to the obstacles of our own making--the traps we set for ourselves. In my work as a coach to senior leaders (and in my own life), these traps tend to fall into three categories:

Magical Thinking

Then close your eyes, and tap your heels together three times. And think to yourself: There's no place like home!

~Glinda, the Good Witch of the North [1]

There's a positive correlation between optimism and effective leadership, in part because the optimistic leader has a contagious effect on others, rendering success more likely. [2] And yet there's a point at which unbridled confidence is merely a wish, and optimism becomes magical thinking, which can be particularly dangerous for a leader. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson notes that the risks of excessive optimism include resistance to negative data and failure to learn from experience. [3]

What can we do? Cultivate a tolerance for cognitive dissonance. This is the mental state evoked when we're confronted with ideas or data that appear to be inconsistent, which most people find so unpleasant that they modify their beliefs (and their behavior) or simply ignore certain data in order to restore conceptual consistency. When we engage in magical thinking, what we're really doing is soothing the discomfort evoked by cognitive dissonance, wishing away the risks and concerns that are inconsistent with our preferred outcomes. We don't have to become pessimists, but we need to anticipate cognitive dissonance and take steps to become more comfortable with discomfort. [4]

Self-Delusions

There is nothing...to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution.

~Harry Frankfurt  [5]

We like to think that we know ourselves well, and yet our view of ourselves is as subject to bias and distortion as our perspective on any other subject--perhaps even more so, given the host of blind spots that impede our view. This includes unrealistic self-regard and unrealistic self-criticism, and both are equally problematic. Leaders with an inflated estimation of their own abilities are staples of tragic stories in history, literature, and the annals of management practice. But in my experience as a coach the vainglorious hero who takes a fall is actually less common than the person whose perceived limitations become real ones, unable to get out of their own way. [6]

What can we do? First, adopt a fundamental attitude toward ourselves: View ourselves as a work-in-progress, open to learning and change, and seek to maintain a growth mindset in which our capabilities are plastic and evolving. [7] Then hold regular "conversations with ourselves" by making a consistent commitment to turn our abstract reflections into more concrete thoughts through some form of writing, and engaging others in coaching conversations in order to gain some critical distance on our subjective experience. [8] Finally, actively solicit feedback from people we trust to minimize those blind spots--and note that in my experience positive feedback is actually more stressful than negative feedback, but it is just as valuable in raising our self-awareness. [9]

What Ought to Be

You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.

~Marlo Stanfield [10]

We hold a set of beliefs about the way the world works, and these mental models have a profound impact on our experience of the world. [11] A subset of these beliefs involve the way the world is supposed to work, the way things "ought to be," and these ideas can be tremendously durable and resistant to modification. This makes sense, up to a point. We rely heavily on our mental models to determine cause-and-effect, predict likely outcomes, and modify our behavior accordingly, and they usually serve us well for these purposes. It would be a waste of effort to revisit them constantly. But in some circumstances we remain attached to our mental model of "what ought to be" even in the face of extensive evidence that it's wrong or out of date.

What can we do? See our mental models as just that--simplified versions of reality that enable us to navigate the world which must be updated on a regular basis. When the territory doesn't resemble the map, we have to modify the map. [12] This often involves some form of "double-loop learning," in which we look beyond the results we're achieving (or failing to achieve) and exploring the assumptions and beliefs that underpin our current goals and strategies. [13] We're also well-served by enhancing our capacity for emotion regulation. [14] When our model of "what ought to be" is contradicted by reality, we often experience a surge of righteous indignation, and even when such passion motivates us to remake reality to conform with our ideals, we need to manage those feelings to enlist others in the cause and avoid burnout. Finally, we can take an entirely different stance toward these perceived impediments--they may be there not to block us, but to teach us, and it may be a lesson that could be learned in no other manner. Sometimes, the obstacle IS the way. [15]

 

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Footnotes

[1] The Wizard of Oz (directed by Victor Fleming, produced by Mervyn LeRoy, based on the book by L. Frank Baum, portrayed by Billie Burke, Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, 1939)

[2] See Dispositional Affect and Leadership Effectiveness: A Comparison of Self-Esteem, Optimism, and Efficacy (Martin Chemers, Carl Watson, and Stephen May, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2000), and Impact of Leadership Style and Emotion on Subordinate Performance (Janet McColl-Kennedy and Ronald Anderson, The Leadership Quarterly, 2002).

[3] The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them (Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley, 2012)

[4] The Cognitive Dissonance of the CEO

[5] On Bullshit, page 67 (Harry Frankfurt, 2005. First published in The Raritan Quarterly Review, 1986.)

[6] Three More Horsemen (How We Self-Sabotage)

[7] Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, 2014) 

[8] Conversations with Ourselves

[9] Make Getting Feedback Less Stressful

[10] Refugees, The Wire, Season Four (Written by Dennis Lehane, portrayed by Jamie Hector, HBO, 2006)

• Here's a brief clip that's worth watching.

[11] Corn Mazes and Mental Models

[12] The Map Is Not the Territory

[13] Building Blocks (A Tactical Approach to Change)

[14] The Tyranny of Feelings

[15] The Obstacle Is The Way

 

Photo by insight pest.

Why You Can't Stop Thinking About Something

A common challenge faced by my clients is an inability to stop thinking about something that's obsessing them:

• An intractable problem in the business.
• An interaction that went badly in some way.
• A difficult relationship with a colleague or in their personal life.
• Or simply the existential risks that accompany leadership in uncertain times.

While this is an oversimplication, there are three factors that explain much about why we can't simply "turn off" unwanted thoughts:

Emotions Are Attention Magnets

As I've written before, psychologist Victor Johnston describes emotions as "discriminant hedonic amplifiers," meaning that they boost various signals in our mental landscape, drawing our attention toward certain issues and events and away from others. In other words, emotions are attention magnets. [1,2] This is a "feature" that can feel like a "bug." [3] Unlike the slow, methodical process of logical reasoning, in which the narrow window of consciousness allows us to focus on a relatively small number of objects, emotions allow us to process vast amounts of data from multiple sources at once, rapidly alerting us to potential opportunities and threats. (To be clear, emotions do not work in opposition to logical reasoning--rather, they're essential inputs into the process. [4])

As a species we obviously benefit from this capability--that's the feature. The late psychologist Daniel Wegner noted that it's essential for emotions to be able to interrupt conscious thought and capture our attention:

It is clear that emotion should not be very susceptible to willful control. If we could turn off all our emotions, feel no pain, never laugh, not be gripped by fear or despair, stop being excited, and so on, we could easily end up dead... It is good, in other words, that when we feel an emotional state, our normal purposes and interests succumb to an influence beyond our control. The priority of emotions over will is important for our survival because it allows our plans to be interrupted by the immediate pressures of reality. [5]

The dilemma is that emotions are a "quick and dirty signal," in the words of neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux. [6] Just because we have an emotional response to a situation doesn't mean that it's actually worth our attention. Compounding the problem is the fact that negative emotions have a much stronger and long-lasting impact than positive ones. [7] My clients never complain about being unable to stop thinking about all the good things in their lives. So while we benefit as a species, the magnetic pull of negative emotions can make it profoundly difficult for us as individuals to put them out of mind when it would be helpful to do so--that's the bug.

"Meta-Thoughts" Contain "Object Thoughts"

Wegner used the terms "meta-thoughts" and "object thoughts" to describe two different types of thinking:

The term cognition refers to thinking; meta-cognition is the term for thoughts about thinking. Loosely speaking, the process of thinking is something people do to things inside their head. This definition highlights the most obvious quality of thought--its character of having an object. We think about things, and the curious quality of thought is that it requires something to be about... Meta-cognition occurs when thought takes itself as an object. [8]

An attempt to stop thinking about something that's obsessing us is a meta-thought (the effort to stop thinking) about an object thought (the thing that's obsessing us). We're constantly engaged in the process of directing our attention toward (and away from) various possible objects, as we weigh the costs and benefits of attending to (and ignoring) each object:

All meta-cognition can be viewed as the relative emphasis or de-emphasis of object-level thoughts... The result is...a relative concentration on certain object-level thoughts or a relative suppression of certain object-level thoughts... At the meta-cognitive level, the mind registers what is okay, or not okay, at the object level. Meta-cognitions are preferences for our minds, wishes about what we might think. [9]

The challenge, Wegner notes, is that a meta-thought directing us to stop thinking about a particular object thought contains the problematic object thought itself:

When meta-cognitions do step in, they must lumber into the light of the conscious window to try to change the view. As it turns out, this is a key part of their inability to succeed in the immediate suppression of a thought... Our difficult time with thought suppression comes when, in this sequence of conscious thoughts, we get the idea to suppress a current thought. The suppression meta-thought ("I'd rather not think of a white bear") is here, but the thought ("white bear") is here, too. As long as we hold the meta-thought in the conscious window, the thought will be there... We cannot split the thought from the meta-thought, even though this is the very purpose of the meta-thought. [10]

Mental Control Is Taxing

Any effort to direct our thinking is a form of "mental control," and all forms of mental control involve what psychologists refer to as "System 2" thinking, a term coined by Keith Stanovich and Richard West [11] and later popularized by Daniel Kahneman. "System 1" thinking, in Kahneman's description, "operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control." In contrast, System 2 thinking,

...allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration. [12]

But System 2 processing is a finite mental capability--we cannot concentrate or direct our attention indefinitely--and so we've evolved a set of mechanisms to ensure that we preserve this precious resource for those situations that truly require it. We have an "attention budget," and, as Kahneman notes, "If you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail." [13] We can experience "ego depletion," in which efforts at self-control and restraint (including, but not limited to, mental control) are perceived as fatiguing, eventually resulting in suboptimal decision-making. [14]

And we follow "the law of least effort," seeking to expend as little mental energy as possible, taking cognitive shortcuts to arrive at imperfect but serviceable answers to the questions we face. [15] As a consequence of these dynamics we typically experience efforts at mental control as taxing and even unpleasant, which often causes us to give up--at which point our attention returns to the magnetic objects of our obsession.

So what can we do when we're unable to stop thinking about something that's obsessing us? There's no simple answer, of course--we won't overcome two million years of evolutionary psychology, nor would we want to even if it were possible. But there are some helpful steps we can take:

• Dedicate time for "bounded worry." Research suggests that allowing ourselves to fully explore our concerns for a set period of time allows us to minimize our worries during the rest of the day. [16]
• Cultivate our capacity for emotion regulation. We can't control our feelings, but we can influence them.
• Commit to a consistent mindfulness practice. Meditation in particular can enhance our capacity for mental control--although note that it should be regard as a workout in attention management, not a break from stress.
• Engage in healthy distractions. We can't extinguish unwanted "object thoughts," because they're smuggled in by our "meta-thoughts"--but we can substitute alternatives that capture our attention.
• And, as always, write about it and talk about it with people we trust. (And possibly consider working with a coach.)

 

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Footnotes

[1] To Stay Focused, Manage Your Emotions

[2] Why We Feel: The Science of Human Emotions, page 156 (Victor Johnston, 1999)

[3] "It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature" Trite--or Just Right? (Nicholas Carr, Wired, 2018)

[4] Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason

[5] White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts: Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology of Mental Control, page 123 (Daniel Wegner, 2nd edition, 1994)

[6] The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, page 163 (Joseph LeDoux, 1998)

[7] Bad Is Stronger Than Good (Roy Bauermeister, Catrin Finkenauer, Ellen Bratslavsky, and Kathleen D. Vohs, Review of General Psychology, 2001)

[8] Wegner, pages 43-44.

[9] Ibid, page 49.

[10] Ibid, pages 55-56.

[11] Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? (Keith Stanovich and Richard West, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 23, Issue 5, October 2000)

• Stanovich and others have gone on to point out shortcomings in the System 1/System 2 framework, while affirming its utility, and it is certainly sufficient for the purposes of this discussion. For more, see Dual-Process Theories of Cognitive Processing: Advancing the Debate (Jonathan Evans and Keith Stanovich, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2013)

[12] Thinking, Fast and Slow, pages 20-21 (Daniel Kahneman, 2013)

[13] Ibid, page 23.

[14] Ibid, pages 41-42.

• As I've noted before, early research on ego depletion suggested that varying levels of glucose in the bloodstream played a significant role in the process, but this conclusion has not been supported by more recent studies, and the underlying neurological mechanisms are still being explored.

[15] Ibid, pages 35-40, page 99.

[16] Cited by health journalist Lea Winerman in her report on a presentation by Wegner at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association: Suppressing the "white bears" (Lea Winerman, Monitor on Psychology, Volume 43, No. 9, October 2011)

 

For Further Reading

Attention Surplus Disorder (Anxiety and Distraction)

Attitude and Behavior

White Bears and Car Crashes (Thinking About Thinking)

The Tyranny of Feelings

Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! (Mindfulness for Busy People)

A Better Information Diet

The Value of Journal Writing

Talking About Feelings

The Art of Self-Coaching: Attention (Stanford GSB Class of 2016 Reunion)

 

Photo by apol-photography.

CONNECTIONS: Meaningful Virtual Conversations

Co-created with Agnes Le and Terra Winston. Image by Mohamed Hassan.

Agnes, Terra and I were MBA students together at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a few months ago we were asked to design a program that would help our classmates connect virtually during our 20th reunion, which is taking place this year. A number of them found it useful, so we decided to share this edited version more broadly.

OVERVIEW

Below is a structured agenda to help anyone host a virtual gathering of 6 people for 90 minutes. Virtual groups can easily lose a sense of intimacy, so we recommend limiting these groups to 6 people, including the host, and the agenda below is designed to accommodate a group of this size. We feel that 90 minutes will allow sufficient time for a meaningful conversation while fitting into peoples' busy schedules. In addition to the agenda you'll find two appendices: a set of technical tips for an improved virtual experience and a welcome email template.

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EVENT AGENDA AND TIPS FOR HOSTS

Step 1: Warming Up (10 mins)

Step 2: Getting to Know You (30 mins)

Step 3: A Deeper Dive (40 mins)

Step 4: Closing Down (10 mins)

Step 5: Afterwards (Optional)

Preliminary Notes

• Introductions: As you'll see below in the welcome email template, if members of the group don't already know each other we encourage people to make initial introductions by sharing some basic information via email prior to the event. This begins the process of creating a sense of connection, while allowing you to start the virtual event by diving into the agenda. (This will also allow you to follow up with anyone who fails to respond in order to confirm their participation.)
• Timekeeping: While these events shouldn't feel like overly structured business meetings, there's value in using a timer to manage the agenda and stay on schedule. The first two exercises are intended to get everyone involved and create a sense of connection and intimacy while leaving sufficient time for a meaningful open discussion. Keeping track of time will also ensure that the event ends when scheduled so that all group members can participate in the closing together. People shouldn't feel abruptly cut off by the timer, but it should serve as a signal to conclude their remarks quickly.

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Step 1: Warming Up (10 mins)

Purpose: Help everyone join in the conversation and start building energy.

Tips for Hosts

• This should feel spontaneous and fast-paced, so it's not necessary to share the questions with participants in advance--simply choose 3 questions that you find engaging, or invent your own.
• Some participants may need a visual cue so you might want to share the 3 questions on the screen.
• You can simply "go around the circle" to get everyone participating quickly--in a virtual setting this may require you to determine who goes next.
• Use a timer to let people know when their 90 seconds is up and to stay on schedule.

Three Questions

1. The host shares all 3 questions at the beginning of the exercise. Again, this may include a visual cue.
2. Each person has 90 seconds to answer all 3 questions.
3. Below are some suggested questions, but feel free to invent your own:

• What did you want to be when you were growing up?
• Who would play you in the movie of your life?
• Who’s one of your role models?
• What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
• What’s one thing you’re grateful for?
• What’s one thing you miss right now?
• What’s your superpower?
• What’s a gift you can share with this group?
• What’s your least-favorite nickname?
• What’s your favorite food?
• Where’s the first place you’ll travel post-pandemic?
• What’s the last book you read?
• What’s the last movie you saw in a theater?
• What’s one thing you do to take care of yourself?
• Why were you interested in participating in this group?
• When were you really happy (or excited or sad or scared)?

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Step 2: Getting to Know You (30 mins)

Purpose: Learn more about each other, build safety and trust, and have the host model vulnerability and timeliness.

Tips for Hosts

• The warm-up exercise above is intended to be spontaneous, but both of the options here in Step 2 are more effective when participants can reflect on the questions in advance. Choose one of the options here and share the relevant question/s with the group in your welcome email.
• These exercises can stir up a range of thoughts and feelings, which is why we recommend spending some time in discussion after concluding the responses.
• Allow participants to volunteer to speak when they're ready, rather than "going around the circle" or determining who will go next. This allows people to feel more agency in the process, which can influence what they choose to share.
• Again, use a timer to let people know when their time is up and to stay on schedule.
• You should go first to model timeliness and a degree of candor and vulnerability. The goal is to be sufficiently candid to make it a more meaningful dialogue, but not so much as to be overwhelming for anyone.

Option A: The Most Important Year of My Life.

1. Each person has 3 minutes to answer this question: What was the most important year of my life?
2. Note that the question is NOT: What was the BEST year of my life? It's an important distinction.
3. After each person has finished, take a moment to acknowledge them and express appreciation for their story, but don't do an extensive debrief or ask further questions at this point.
4. Take 10 minutes after the last person has finished to discuss the exercise. If necessary, you can initiate the discussion with a few questions: What was that like? How do you feel as a result? What questions are you left with?

Option B: Memories, Pride, Work

• The group will answer each of these questions in sequence (i.e. everyone answers Question One, then everyone answers Question Two, and then everyone answers Question Three).

1. Question One: What’s a meaningful memory of mine?
2. Question Two: As I look back over recent years, what am I proud of?
3. Question Three: As I look ahead to the future, what am I working on?
4. Each person has 1 minute to answer each question.
5. Take 10 minutes after the last person has concluded to discuss the exercise. If necessary, you can initiate the discussion with a few questions: What was that like? How do you feel as a result? What questions are you left with?

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Step 3: A Deeper Dive (40 mins)

Purpose: Create space for a more open-ended conversation.

Tips for Hosts

• Choose a topic from the options below (or invent your own) and introduce the topic and related questions to the group in your welcome email so they have time to reflect.
• Unlike the structured exercises above, the questions below are merely suggestions to help the group get started. The goal isn’t to answer each question in a rigid or time-limited way, and the group should feel free to follow their interests and intuition.
• If your video platform offers virtual breakout rooms, you can consider using them to begin this activity, dividing the group into 3 pairs or 2 trios. If so, be sure to familiarize yourself with the breakout room logistics, and have the pairs/trios spend no more than 10 minutes in the breakout rooms to allow sufficient time for a full-group discussion.
• If you use breakout rooms, an option to initiate the full-group discussion after returning everyone to the main room is to ask everyone to respond to the question, "What did you learn in your pair/trio?"
• Watch the clock during the full-group discussion to allow time for a closing activity.

Topic A: Meaning and Purpose

• What provides me with a sense of meaning and purpose today?
• What surprises me about this?
• How has this changed in recent years?
• How might it continue to change in the future?

Topic B: Pandemic Life

• What challenges am I facing as a result of the pandemic?
• How am I coping with these challenges?
• What am I learning about myself in the process?
• How is the pandemic affecting my expectations for the future?

Topic C: Hopes, Dreams and Fears

• What are my hopes, dreams and fears today?
• How do they differ from my hopes, dreams and fears of the past?
• What hopes and dreams have I accomplished? What fears have I vanquished?
• What hopes and dreams have I abandoned? What fears have grown worse?

Or invent your own topic and set of questions...

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Step 4: Closing Down (10 mins)

Purpose: Allow all participants to bring the event to an end together.

Tips for Hosts

• You can choose one of the options below or invent an alternative, but it’s important to hold some form of organized closing in which all members participate.
• It's less fulfilling for the group if the event runs long and one or more members have to leave before or during the closing--this is one reason why staying on time throughout the previous steps is important.

Option A: Unstructured

1. Each person simply says whatever they need to say to feel finished. Depending on the amount of time remaining, the host may want to set a time limit.
2. If time is very short, each person can say just one word to close the conversation. (This is viable in the absence of an alternative, but the host should try to manage time to ensure that more time is available.)
3. If there’s slightly more time, each person can say whatever they need to say to feel finished, as long as they can say it in a single breath.

Option B: What did you learn?

• Each person answers this question. Again, depending on the amount of time remaining, the host may want to set a time limit.

Option C: What will you remember about this experience?

• Each person answers this question. Again, depending on the amount of time remaining, the host may want to set a time limit.

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Step 5: Afterwards (Optional)

Purpose: Express thanks and create opportunities to stay connected.

You may want to send a thank you note to the group, which can serve as an invitation to stay connected in a number of different ways. Questions you can pose to your group members include:

• Is there someone you’d like to thank or express appreciation for, either one-on-one or in a message to the group?
• Is there anything you’d like to offer to the group or to any individuals?
• Do you have any requests you’d like to make of the group or of any individuals?

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APPENDIX 1: TECHNICAL TIPS

(This information is also included in the welcome email template from the host to the participants.)

Here are a few guidelines to make a virtual conversation as meaningful as possible:

• Privacy: Find a private space in which you won't be interrupted or distracted. If it's possible that other people with you might overhear this virtual conversation, wear headphones to insure the privacy of the other participants.
• Tools: In a virtual conversation the quality of the tools we use and the surrounding environment can have a big impact on the quality of the conversation. Ensure that you’ll have uninterrupted access to a broadband connection if at all possible. Consider using an outboard camera and microphone for better image and sound quality. Pay particular attention to your lighting and your background.
• Presence: Virtual conversations can be meaningful only to the extent that everyone participating is fully present and actively involved. Turn off any devices, services or alarms that might distract you. Multi-tasking will be obvious to the other participants and will diminish the sense of safety and trust in the group. Strive to be fully present and make it as easy as possible to do so.
• Confidentiality: Virtual conversations have the potential to be more meaningful when participants’ trust in the group’s confidentiality. This should be acknowledged at the outset by the host, and again, if you are sharing space with others wear headphones.

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APPENDIX 2: WELCOME EMAIL TEMPLATE AND COMMUNICATIONS

Welcome Email Template

FROM: Host
TO: Group Participants
SUBJECT: Our Connections event on [date]

Hi there,

I’m excited that we’ll be getting together for our Connections virtual conversation.

Logistics

• [Date]
• [Time and time zone]
• [Meeting link, ID and password]

Introduce Yourself

Let’s get to know each other before the event by sharing a little background via email. Here’s a little about me... Please share something about yourself in response to this message (and be sure to "Reply All.")

Hopes and Expectations

We’ll meet for 90 minutes, and I’ll manage our agenda to be sure we finish on time. My hope for our time together is to have a meaningful conversation, reflect on our lives, and connect with each other in the process. If you have additional hopes or expectations, please share them with the rest of the group.

Agenda and Preparation

Step 1: Warming Up (10 mins): No preparation necessary--we’ll jump in with some questions that I’ll provide.

Step 2: Getting to Know You (30 mins): This involves a question (or questions) I’d like you to reflect on:

• (Option A, one question) What was the most important year of my life? And note that "most important" doesn’t necessarily mean “best.” You’ll have 3 minutes to tell the group about this year.
• (Option B, three questions) What’s a meaningful memory of mine? As I look back over recent years, what am I proud of? As I look ahead to the future, what am I working on? You’ll have one minute per question to respond.

Step 3: A Deeper Dive (40 mins): This involves a more far-reaching conversation, and I’d like you to consider the following: (Share the topic you’ve selected and the related questions.)

Step 4: Closing Down (10 mins): No preparation necessary, but be sure to clear your calendar so you won’t have to leave early.

Technical Tips

Here are a few recommendations that will make our conversation as meaningful as possible:

• Privacy: Find a private space in which you won’t be interrupted or distracted. If it’s possible that other people with you might overhear this virtual conversation, wear headphones to insure the privacy of the other participants.
• Tools: In a virtual conversation, the quality of the tools we use and the surrounding environment can have a big impact on the quality of the conversation. Ensure that you’ll have uninterrupted access to a broadband connection if at all possible. Consider using an outboard camera and microphone for better image and sound quality. Pay particular attention to your lighting and your background.
• Presence: Virtual conversations can be meaningful only to the extent that everyone participating is fully present and actively involved. Turn off any devices, services or alarms that might distract you. Multi-tasking will be obvious to the other participants and will diminish the sense of safety and trust in the group. Strive to be fully present and make it as easy as possible to do so.
• Confidentiality: Virtual conversations have the potential to be more meaningful when participants’ trust in the group’s confidentiality. This should be acknowledged at the outset by the host, and again, if you are sharing space with others wear headphones.

Don’t hesitate to reach out before the event if you have any questions. I look forward to connecting with you soon!

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Communications

Note that this initial email to your participants serves several purposes:

• It conveys necessary logistical information.
• It provides an agenda and reflection questions so that people will feel oriented and better prepared to participate.
• It allows you and the participants to exchange some information about yourselves so that you can begin the event with something more provocative and energizing than basic introductions.
• And it begins the process of creating a sense of connection, which makes it more likely that people will show up prepared to participate fully.

If a member of your group doesn't respond to your email within a reasonable period, reach out to them directly to confirm that they received it and intend to participate.

Tumbling Down Maslow's Hierarchy

We should never have the desire to compose music or create mathematical systems, or to adorn our homes, or to be well dressed if our stomachs were empty most of the time, or if we were continually dying of thirst, or if we were continually threatened by an always impending catastrophe...

~Abraham Maslow [1]

Part 1: Maslow's Hierarchy

Although the eminent psychologist Abraham Maslow first developed his theory of human motivation in the 1940s, it remains highly relevant as we seek to understand the impact of the current environment on our lives today. [2] Maslow's ideas and the humanistic psychology movement that he influenced have been subject to criticism over the years, but I continue to find this body of knowledge a source of profound insight in my work as a coach with senior leaders. [3]

Maslow, born in Brooklyn in 1908 to Russian immigrant parents, had a deeply unhappy childhood, which he ascribed in part to being the only Jewish family in his neighborhood. But a happy marriage at age 20 and a brilliant academic career in psychology transformed him, and returning to New York to teach in 1937, Maslow was a charismatic and popular professor, known as "the Frank Sinatra of Brooklyn College." [4] A 33-year-old father of two, Maslow wasn't drafted for military service in World War II, but he was deeply affected by the country's efforts in the fight against Fascism, which led to an emotional experience as he observed a parade of soldiers:

As I watched, the tears ran down my face. I felt that we didn't understand--not Hitler, nor the Germans, nor Stalin, nor the Communists. We didn't understand any of them... It was at that moment that I realized that the rest of my life must be devoted to discovering a psychology for the peace table... I wanted to prove that human beings are capable of something grander than war and prejudice and hatred. [5]

The result was what Maslow called "a positive theory of human motivation," with an emphasis on what can be learned not from unwell people under the care of psychotherapists (the focus of most research at the time) but from healthy and high-functioning people. "The most important concerns of the greatest and finest people in human history must all be encompassed and explained." [6] Maslow's core concept was a "hierarchy of needs," organized according to their "prepotency" or their ability to command our attention and influence our behavior. This hierarchy begins with physiological needs, such as hunger, thirst and sleep:

Undoubtedly these physiological needs are the most prepotent of all needs. What this means specifically is that in the human being who is missing everything in life in an extreme fashion, it is most likely that the major motivation would be the physiological needs rather than any others. A person who is lacking food, safety, love, and esteem would most probably hunger for food more strongly than for anything else. [7]

But what happens to [a person's] desires when there is plenty of bread and when [their] belly is chronically filled? At once other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still higher) needs emerge, and so on. This is what we mean by saying the basic human needs are organized into a hierarchy of relative prepotency. [8, emphasis original]

As indicated by the first passage above, the basic needs that emerge once physiological needs are met are the following:

• Safety: "Security; stability; dependency; protection; freedom from fear, from anxiety, and chaos; need for structure, order, law, limits; strength in the protector... [The safety needs] may serve as the almost exclusive organizers of behavior, and we may then fairly describe the whole organism as a safety-seeking mechanism." [9]
• Belongingness and Love: "If both the physiological and the safety needs are fairly well gratified, there will emerge the love and affection and belongingness needs, and the whole cycle already described will repeat itself with this new center. Now the person will feel keenly, as never before, the absence of friends, or a sweetheart...or children. [They] will hunger for affectionate relations with people in general... Now [they] will feel sharply the pangs of loneliness, of ostracism, of rejection, of friendlessness, of rootlessness." [10]
• Esteem: People "have a need or desire for a stable, firmly based, usually high evaluation of themselves, for self-respect, or self-esteem, and for the esteem of others. These needs may therefore be classified into two subsidiary sets. These are, first, the desire for strength, for achievement, for adequacy, for mastery and competence, for confidence in the face of the world, and for independence and freedom. Second, we have what we may call the desire for reputation or prestige (defining it as respect or esteem from other people), status, fame and glory, dominance, recognition, attention, importance, dignity or appreciation. [11]
• Self-Actualization: "Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what [they], individually [are] fitted for... What a [person] can be, [they] must be. This need we may call self-actualization... This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one idiosyncratically is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming. The specific form that these needs will take will of course vary greatly from person to person. [12]

Often inaccurately displayed as a pyramid--an image never used by Maslow himself--the hierarchy of needs is better represented as a ladder, as discussed in a thought-provoking 2019 paper that reinforces the value of Maslow's work while rejecting its customary presentation:

The depiction of the [hierarchy of needs] as a pyramid, with horizontal lines demarcating the different levels, makes it difficult to imagine that people can be simultaneously striving to satisfy a number of different needs. When one is on a ladder, multiple rungs are occupied by the feet and hands, and other rungs may be leaned on as well. The ladder as thus described is far closer to Maslow’s original thinking. [13]

So although higher needs emerge as lower ones become fulfilled during the course of our growth and development, we're always working to address multiple sets of needs simultaneously on various "rungs" of the ladder, a point Maslow makes explicitly:

[It is a] false impression that a need must be satisfied 100 percent before the next need emerges. In actual fact, most members of our society who are normal are partially satisfied in all their basic needs and partially unsatisfied in all their basic needs at the same time. A more realistic description of the hierarchy would be in terms of decreasing percentages of satisfaction as we go up the hierarchy of prepotency. For instance, if I may assign arbitrary figures for the sake of illustration, it is as if the average citizen is satisfied perhaps 85 percent in [their] physiological needs, 70 percent in [their] safety needs, 50 percent in [their] love needs, 40 percent in [their] self-esteem needs, and 10 percent in [their] self-actualization needs. [14]

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Part 2: Tumbling Down

Why does this matter? More specifically, why does it matter today? It matters because in the current environment many people aren't moving up the ladder, they're moving down, and I see a version of this in my coaching practice. Most of my clients are CEOs, and all of them are high-status professionals for whom work fulfills many different needs, which is also true for the vast majority of their employees. And from the perspective of my clients and their colleagues the current environment has created a profound sense of unease as needs that had been largely fulfilled long ago are now making themselves felt again, in some cases for the first time in years:

• People who were pursuing a degree of self-actualization through work feel that such an accomplishment is beyond their grasp as more pressing needs occupy their energy and attention.
• Feelings of esteem are eroded as businesses struggle and people feel less capable of achieving their professional goals, and sense their reputation or status suffering as a result.
• The relationships and sense of community that people enjoyed at work have frayed in the absence of in-person contact or as a consequence of relocations and layoffs. (I've coached more CEOs through layoffs in the past six months than I did in the past decade.)
• The ineffective response to the pandemic, as well as increased levels of political polarization and social unrest, have led to a diminished sense that the world is a secure or predictable place and undermined faith in collective institutions.
• A heightened awareness of the risks of infection and violence has left people feeling physically vulnerable, while also making it harder to achieve consistent sleep or exercise regularly.

To be clear, my clients are keenly aware of the privileges they enjoy that made it possible to move up Maslow's ladder in the first place. I feel this myself, as I've been able to move my coaching practice online and minimize my own risk of infection, when many people I know have had their businesses severely impacted or must expose themselves to potential infection in order to earn a living. But while acknowledging that others are suffering more deeply may help us put our own suffering in perspective, it doesn't make our suffering irrelevant. I'm certainly seeing a great deal of suffering in my practice, and Maslow highlighted one of its sources:

We tend to take for granted the blessings we already have, especially if we don't have to work or struggle for them. The food, the security, the love, the admiration, the freedom that have always been there, that have never been lacking or yearned for tends not only to be unnoticed but also even to be devalued or mocked or destroyed. This phenomenon of failing to count one's blessings is, of course, not realistic and can therefore be considered to be a form of pathology. In most instances it is cured very easily, simply by experiencing the appropriate deprivation or lack, e.g. pain, hunger, poverty, loneliness, rejection, injustice, etc. [15]

If a failure to appreciate our blessings is a form of pathology, a more realistic appraisal may well be a step toward psychological health--but that doesn't make it less painful, particularly when the the process of moving down the ladder is accompanied by a number of stressors, as Maslow acknowledges:

Living at the higher need level means greater biological efficiency, greater longevity, less disease, better sleep, appetite, etc... Higher need gratifications produce more desirable subjective results, i.e. more profound happiness, serenity, and richness of the inner life. Satisfaction of the safety needs produce at best a feeling of relief and relaxation...[and] a greater value is usually placed upon the higher need than upon the lower by people who have been gratified in both. [16]

So moving down the ladder to address gaps in needs that were previously addressed can have a substantial psychological and physiological impact. Life is harder, it's less fulfilling in the process, and there's a sharpened sense of loss for the higher needs that were once met or becoming fulfilled. Further, the changes we're experiencing at societal and global levels are eroding our individual ability to pursue basic needs effectively, no matter what our personal circumstances:

The actualization of a person's real potentialities is conditioned upon...all those factors now called "ecological," upon the "health" of the culture, or the lack of it, upon the world situation, etc. Growth toward self-actualization and full-humanness is made possible by a complex hierarchy of "good preconditions." These physical, chemical, biological, interpersonal, cultural conditions matter for the individual finally to the extent that they do or do not supply [them] with the basic human necessities and "rights" which permit [them] to become strong enough, and person enough, to take over [their] own fate. [17]

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Part 3: Climbing Back Up

So what can we do? My previous posts in this series offer some suggestions: Seek out and create pockets of agency in which we can experience a greater sense of control. And heighten our awareness of our emotional state, take action to regulate our threat response, and accept the inevitable limits on our control (because those pockets will extend only so far.)

And Maslow himself offers another starting point: Gratitude. Counting--and truly appreciating--the blessings we enjoy but have so often taken for granted. A few years ago I wrote a "gratitude checklist" that begins as follows:

I'm alive.	☐
I'm not in pain.	☐
I can think clearly.	☐
I can see, hear, and walk.	☐
I'm warm and well-nourished.	☐
I'm protected from the elements.	☐

All of which relate to the very first rung of Maslow's ladder, our physiological needs. Being grateful for these things sounds absurdly easy, but it's actually quite difficult, and Maslow explains why: the blessings we enjoy tend "not only to be unnoticed but also even to be devalued or mocked or destroyed." They vanish from our consideration as we move up the ladder to focus on higher needs, and it feels beneath us somehow to be attending to them again. It is, in a word, humbling to be compelled to acknowledge that these needs matter.

Yet that is a path to gratitude, if we're willing to take it. And in this context being attuned to suffering--others' and our own--can play a meaningful role in helping us count--and appreciate--our blessings. Over the past few days I've been monitoring a wildfire in Napa and Sonoma Counties as it advanced on Santa Rosa, just 15 miles from the farm where I live. Knowing people are losing their homes so close to mine makes me realize more fully what it would mean to not be protected from the elements, to not be warm or well-nourished.

A colleague is suffering from mobility issues, and a family member is in the late stages of dementia, and they make me realize more fully what it would mean to not see, hear or walk, to not think clearly. I'm just emerging from six weeks of constant back pain, the result of an old injury and new stress, and I'm vividly aware of what it means to be in pain--and how truly thankful I am that this latest episode is ending. And having lost one of my best friends to an accident just before the pandemic descended on the U.S., I'm acutely aware of the value of life and grateful for my own, even--and especially--in the current environment.

So gratitude can be found even when we tumble down to the lowest rung of Maslow's ladder--but where do we go from there? The point of gratitude isn't to lower our aspirations (and Maslow would suggest that it's not possible to do so, as he believed that all of the needs described in his hierarchy had an instinctive basis.) How do we begin to climb back up? We must reach out to others.

Maslow notes that our physiological needs are inherently self-centered--we rely on others to help meet our needs for food, housing, or medical care, but the process of fulfilling them is focused on our individual experience of satiation, shelter, or health. But all our other needs can be fulfilled only by working in collaboration with others to help them meet their needs:

To some extent, the higher the need, the less selfish it must be. Hunger is highly egocentric; the only way to satisfy it is to satisfy oneself. But the search for love and respect necessarily involves other people. Moreover, it involves satisfaction for these other people. [18]

Our needs for safety are truly met only when those around us also feel safe. Our needs for belonging and love are fulfilled only by enabling others to feel that they belong, to feel that they are loved. Our needs for esteem are founded upon the reciprocal exchange of esteem with others. And our needs for self-actualization invariably involve helping others become their best selves.

The challenge is that when we've tumbled down a few rungs on the ladder we tend to feel vulnerable and self-protective, and that's understandable. We may need to steady ourselves and heal for a time before we're ready to reach out. But bear in mind that we'll climb back up again only in partnership with others--and sometimes we'll be in a position to offer help, and sometimes we'll need to ask for help ourselves. This will require connection. And vulnerability. And courage.

 

This post is the third in a series on coping in the current environment:

• Part 1: Pockets of Agency
• Part 2: Aggression, Panic, Paralysis, Denial
• Part 3: Tumbling Down Maslow's Hierarchy
• Part 4: Wounded Creatures
• Part 5: The Legitimacy of Loss
• Part 6: Risk Calculus and Social Norms

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Footnotes

[1] Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, page 24 (Abraham Maslow, 1970)

[2] Maslow first published "A Theory of Human Motivation" in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Review in 1943. This paper remained essentially intact as a foundational chapter in his first and most influential book, Motivation and Personality, not only in the 1st edition of 1954, but also in the 2nd edition of 1970, which was published shortly before Maslow's death. A revised 3rd edition was published in 1987, and it includes some worthwhile additions by psychologists James Fadiman, Robert Frager and Ruth Cox, but I consider the 2nd edition a more definitive presentation of Maslow's views, and the passages quoted above are from that volume.

[3] Humanistic psychology--and Maslow in particular--has been criticized for a lack of experimental data, a fault that Maslow himself acknowledged:

It is fair to say that this theory has been quite successful in a clinical, social and personological way, but not in a laboratory and experimental way. It has fitted very well with the personal experience of most people, and has often given them a structured theory that has helped them to have a better sense of their inner lives. It seems for most people to have a direct, personal, subjective plausibility. And yet it still lacks experimental verification and support. I have not yet been able to think of a good way to put it to the test in the laboratory. Part of the answer to this puzzle came from Douglas McGregor, who applied this theory of motivation to the industrial situation. Not only did he find it useful in ordering his data and his observations, but also these data served retroactively as a source of validation and verification for the theory. It is from this area, rather than the laboratory, that empirical support is now coming. [Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, page xii. Maslow was a significant influence on McGregor, who was a professor of management at MIT and is best remembered today for his work on organizational culture.]

But Maslow makes a compelling counter-critique in "Problem Centering vs. Means Centering in Science," chapter 2 in the 2nd edition of Motivation and Personality:

By means centering I refer to the tendency to consider that the essence of science lies in its instruments, techniques, procedures, apparatus, and its methods rather than in its problems, questions, functions or goals... I do not wish to underplay method; I wish only to point out that even in science, means may easily be confused with ends... Means centering tends inevitably to bring into being a scientific orthodoxy... One main danger of scientific orthodoxy is that it tends to block the development of new techniques... Another, probably more important, danger of the orthodoxy fostered by means centering is that it tends to limit more and more the jurisdiction of science. Not only does it block the development of new techniques; it also tends to block the asking of many questions, on grounds that...such questions cannot be answered by currently available techniques... Means-centered orthodoxy encourages scientists to be "safe and sound" rather than bold and daring. It makes the normal business of the scientist seem to be moving ahead inch by inch on the well-laid-out road rather than cutting new paths through the unknown. It forces conservative rather than radical approaches to the not-yet-known. [pages 11-17]

I don't mean to suggest that humanistic concepts should be always be taken at face value. In its later stages in the 1960s and '70s the movement seemed to spawn a number of grandiose, even absurd ideas that are impossible to prove or disprove, defying any sort of scientific analysis. But as an executive coach I value Maslow's willingness to address complex, thorny, meaningful questions because his answers, provisional though they might be, offer me and my clients a rich set of ideas to explore in our efforts to solve real-world problems. In contrast, much contemporary research, although methodologically sound, does not. As Maslow added, "The journals of science are full of instances that illustrate the point, that what is not worth doing, is not worth doing well." [page 18]

[4] "The Influence of Abraham Maslow" (Robert Frager), Foreward to Motivation and Personality, 3rd edition, page xxxvii (Abraham Maslow, et al, 1987). Although Frank Sinatra is remembered today as an elder statesman performing jazz classics, in the mid-1940s he was a 30-year old pop idol whose appeal to teenagers was unprecedented.

[5] Ibid, page xxxviii.

[6] Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, page 33 (Abraham Maslow, 1970)

[7] Ibid, pages 36-37.

[8] Ibid, page 38.

[9] Ibid, page 39.

[10] Ibid, page 43.

[11] Ibid, page 45.

[12] Ibid, page 46.

[13] Who built Maslow’s pyramid? A history of the creation of management studies’ most famous symbol and its implications for management education, page 91 (Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings, John Ballard, Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2019). (Note that I'm precluded by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) from linking directly to a freely-available version of this paper, but you can search for it on the Victoria University of Wellington's open access repository, which is located outside the U.S. and not subject to the DMCA.)

I highly recommend this informative and insightful paper to anyone with an interest in the history of psychology or management education. Bridgman, Cummings and Ballard show that the pyramid was applied to Maslow's hierarchy of needs many years after his initial paper in a now-forgotten business school textbook and a business-oriented magazine, whose most lasting contributions may have been this inaccurate metaphor.

They also argue convincingly that the use of the pyramid creates several problems: It suggests that people must fully satisfy needs at one level before moving to a higher level, and that satisfied needs are no longer motivational. This idea is rooted in the work of Douglas McGregor, who played an instrumental role in promoting Maslow's theory, but Maslow himself disagreed, as noted above. The pyramid is also often employed to illustrate a universal human hierarchy of needs that transcends culture, although Maslow claimed merely that it was "more universal" than alternative models and noted that culture plays an essential role in the process of translating needs into behavior.

The pyramid can also be used to bolster an elitist and exclusionary view of organizational life, with higher needs being viewed as the purview of senior management and beyond the grasp of ordinary employees, a theme that emerges in much of the management literature of the mid-20th century. The highly egalitarian Maslow did not associate self-actualization with material success, but he did view it as an exalted state, attainable only with great effort by those rare few who are fully committed to their growth and development. [See Chapter 11 in Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition.]

And the pyramid's vividness as a metaphor seems to have amplified the impact of Maslow's theory well beyond what would seem to be justified by any research, which Maslow himself acknowledged. In summary, the authors conclude, "Maslow did not say that the [hierarchy of needs] is unidirectional, that achieving higher levels makes you a superior being, that once a need is satisfied it no longer affects behavior, or that it applies to all people in the same way."

[14] Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, page 54 (Abraham Maslow, 1970)

[15] Ibid, page 61.

[16] Ibid, pages 98-99

[17] Ibid, page xxv

[18] Ibid, pages 99-100

 

For Further Reading

Gratitude Checklist

Gualala (On Mortality and Gratitude)

The Fruit of Suffering

Not Every End Is a Goal (On Midlife Malaise)

How We Connect (and Why We Might Not).

Brené Brown, Vulnerability, Empathy and Leadership

Courage Isn't Confidence

 

Photo by US Army Africa.

What Is My Vision of Myself?

Bec Stupak Diop is an artist and designer now living in Dakar, Senegal, although we met when she was working with Bay Area technology companies a few years ago. In a recent exchange she described the transformational journey that she'd undertaken since then, a process that began with this pivotal moment:

I took a look at my life and asked some important questions: What is my vision of myself and how many hours of the day go toward that? How many hours take me away from that?

It proved to be a very useful measure of how I spend my life. It's easy to draw! Just look at one day and see how many hours go toward aspects of your life that feel aligned and how many move away. Also, where do those hours fall in the day? I was squeezing my most favorite things into 2-3 hours from 5am-8am in the mornings, and then followed that with 8+ hours of nothing-very-interesting.

I've been practicing leading my life through a lens of joy. What brings me joy? Do more of that.

Important questions, indeed. Almost all of my clients are leaders in professional roles that they intend to occupy for the foreseeable future, and their positions are typically well-compensated and high-status. But those jobs are also demanding and stressful in ways that lead a number of clients to imagine alternatives.

Occasionally I work with clients as they actively navigate a transition to a new chapter. More commonly I work with them as they redesign various aspects of their professional or personal lives to be more rewarding. And Bec's questions strike me as profoundly useful in that process, no matter what changes we might be considering.

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What is my vision of myself?

Values in Action Survey of Character Strengths

One of the few instruments I use in my practice and in The Art of Self-Coaching is the "Values in Action Survey of Character Strengths;" This instrument, commonly called the VIA, was developed under the leadership of the University of Pennsylvania's Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, and the late Christopher Peterson, an influential psychologist at the University of Michigan. As Seligman and Peterson write in Character Strengths and Virtues, "We can now measure much of what is wrong with people, but what about what about those things that are right?"

The Big Picture (Self-Coaching, Values and Vision)

Our personal values serve as the foundation for our vision for ourselves. The concept of a "vision" is inherently fuzzy and susceptible to abuse--we've all read "vision statements" full of noble sentiments that are routinely ignored. But any good tool can be misused, and I want to rehabilitate this concept. I also want to distinguish between a vision and a goal. Goal-setting is an important step, providing both direction and motivation for the work that follows. [7] But even our most ambitious goals are components of a larger, more comprehensive vision. Our vision for ourselves should be more deeply rooted and enduring than any particular set of goals, and should be the product of far-reaching reflection.

Developing Your Professional Vision

Truly great professionals understand the difference between what should never change and what should be open for change, between what is genuinely sacred and what is not. This rare ability to manage continuity and change--requiring a consciously practiced discipline--is closely linked to the ability to develop a vision.

Leadership and Authenticity

Leaders are constantly 1) acting outside their comfort zones, 2) striving to meet the divergent needs of various groups, and 3) deciding what information should be disclosed and what should be withheld. Under these conditions it's no surprise that a leader may struggle to understand what it means to "be authentic." This challenge can be further compounded by our definition of the "authentic self" and the means by which we encounter it.

---

How many hours of the day go toward that?

Importance vs. Urgency

Important activities are truly meaningful and fulfilling--to you, to the people who matter to you, to your organization, or to some cause that you believe in. They’re not necessarily time-dependent; they can be accomplished almost anytime, and if they go undone for a short stretch no one may even notice.

Urgent activities have a deadline attached to them that matters to someone—although not necessarily to you. They are time-dependent, at least in someone’s mind, and if they go undone that someone is going to be unhappy. They’re not necessarily meaningful or fulfilling, and accomplishing them may not actually make a significant difference.

Growth, Profitability and Return on Attention

When considering different tasks, projects and opportunities, how should we decide where to focus our time and energy? If our attention is our most precious resource, how can we determine where to invest it and what returns we should expect?

Happy Workaholics Need Boundaries, Not Balance

Success is typically a function of our passion for work and accomplishment—my clients and students are generally "happy workaholics" who love what they do and wish there were more hours in the day to get things done. (I view myself this way as well.) The concept of life/work balance isn’t that helpful for us, because there’s always more work to do, we’re eager to do it, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. In some cases, particularly in junior roles early in our careers, this tendency can be exploited by a dysfunctional culture or an uncaring manager, and at those times we need to protect ourselves to avoid burnout. But as we advance professionally we’re less subject to those external forces, and we need to protect ourselves primarily from our own internal drive.

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How many hours take me away from that?

The Trap of Competition

We've evolved to think extensively about other people and to be keenly attuned to competitive dynamics. This gives us a tremendous advantage as a species--but can leave us deeply unhappy as individuals. What can we do about it?

Not Every End Is a Goal (On Midlife Malaise)

You're a senior leader in the prime of your career who's attained a degree of professional and personal success. You're keenly aware of the advantages you enjoy and feel grateful for the opportunity to do meaningful work that's well-compensated. You still have financial goals and would enjoy earning more, but that's no longer a primary driver. And yet despite these accomplishments it's not uncommon for you to feel a sense of restlessness or disenchantment. If so, you're similar to a number of my clients.

Show Me Your Calendar and I'll Show You What You Value

Money is a less meaningful measure of value than time. Money's relative nature makes it less helpful as a guide to what truly matters to each of us. Time, in contrast, is a more accurate metric. We all have the same number of hours in the day, days in the week, weeks in the year. And how we allocate that time says everything about what we value. I'm keenly aware that having (and lacking) money has a substantial impact on how we spend our time--and yet even when our decision to allocate time to an activity or task (or not) is influenced by our financial affairs, we're still saying something about what we value.

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Thanks to Bec Stupak Diop for the inspiration.

Photo: Drake's Head, Point Reyes National Seashore.

Feeling Safe in an Unsafe World

To talk about feeling safe in an unsafe world, I'm going to use a very reductive model of the universe. This is admittedly oversimplified, but it’s useful as a starting point: A profound psychological need that we have as human beings is a sense of safety. We yearn for safety. To some extent, this is the result of evolution. Our distant ancestors who were more attuned to danger were much more likely to pass their genes down. And as a consequence of thousands of generations of human beings, the result is that we are a profoundly anxious species. And a sense of safety is necessary for us to overcome that anxiety and get on with our daily functioning.

This is also the result of what we might think of as the curse of consciousness. Consciousness offers many advantages, but it also renders us aware of our mortality in a way that other animal species are not. Certain intelligent animals--elephants, ravens, some species of whale--do seem to indicate an awareness of death, but it seems unlikely that they're aware of their impending individual mortality. [1] We as human beings suffer under that burden uniquely, and so creating a sense of safety around us is profoundly important and yet often difficult.

We believe the path to safety lies through establishing a greater sense of certainty and control over our environment. When we can predict what's going to happen with some certainty, when we can exert some agency and control over what happens, we feel safer. But what is the relationship between these two dimensions? Is it linear? What I see in my practice is that we often act as though it’s non-linear, with greater amounts of certainty and control yielding increasing returns on our sense of safety.

But this way of thinking presupposes the existence of a relatively safe and predictable world. In a predictable world, the initial amounts of certainty and control that we can exert don't grant us that much additional safety because it's already a relatively safe environment. So we strive at the outer limits to obtain even more certainty and even more control. We look to create an environment in which we can be almost 100% certain about what's going to happen in the future and in which we can act with tremendous control and authority and agency. Extreme amounts of certainty and control are vitally important to us because we believe that they’re necessary in order to experience a meaningful sense of safety.

But what if the non-linear relationship is inversed? What if greater amounts of certainty and control yield diminishing returns on our sense of safety? This reflects a world that is somewhat unpredictable, somewhat chaotic, somewhat unsafe in which our initial efforts to obtain a degree of certainty and control over our environment actually grant us a tremendous amount of safety and security. But further efforts at the outer reaches to gain more certainty and control may do relatively little to change our sense of safety.

What if we take this argument a step further? What if we exist in a very unpredictable, very unsafe, and profoundly chaotic world? In that context modest amounts of certainty and control may go a long way toward establishing the safety that we really need, and efforts beyond that point are going to be relatively useless. The events of the last few months have caused us to ask, "What kind of world do we live in?"

I would suggest that we live in a world that is less predictable, more chaotic, less safe. And as a result our initial efforts to establish some control and certainty may be all that we need to afford us the requisite sense safety that allows us to function effectively. But it's also worth asking, "What if there isn't a relationship here at all? What if there is no relationship between our actual safety and our sense of certainty and control? What if control is an illusion?"

The eminent psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp stated very definitively: "Control is an illusion." [2] The sense of control that we enjoy is entirely illusory, and we pursue it only to create a sense of safety. But what if we go a step further and ask, "What if safety is, too? What if the sense of safety that we're striving to achieve is also an illusion?" If so, then that poses a difficult question that we have to wrestle with: How do we feel safe in an unsafe world?

I don't have a definitive answer, but I have a provisional one, and that's emotional regulation—which does not mean emotion suppression. We can't suppress our emotions for any sustained period of time. If we try, it's usually counterproductive and sometimes makes the feelings that we're looking to hold at bay even more intense. But there are some practices that we can pursue that will allow us to develop our capacity for emotion regulation. We can remember them by this simple, cheesy acronym: MESS. I'm not a fan of cheesy acronyms, and this is literally the only one that I use in my practice and my teaching.

M for mindfulness, and the most reliable path to a mindful state is meditation. There are other practices, such walking, time in nature, certain forms of exercise. The research on meditation suggests that if we meditate on a consistent daily basis for about 10 minutes, we’ll start to experience some distinctions in our ability to regulate our emotions after about two months. [3]

E for exercise, and a regular commitment to physical activity is important because emotions are physiological events before they register in consciousness. When we're more regularly active on a consistent basis, we're better attuned to what we're feeling earlier in the process. [4]

S for sleep, which is incredibly important--an ample body of research shows that when we are not well rested our ability to regulate our emotions diminishes significantly. [5]

And another S for reducing chronic stress. To be very clear, I'm not suggesting that we should be striving to live in a stress-free world--that's impossible, especially these days. Nor do we need to view stressful experiences as inherently negative--it's how we respond to those experiences that matters. But there are often a number of low-level chronic stressors in our life that we can minimize or remove with some modest changes. [6]

By committing to these kinds of simple practices on a consistent basis, we can enhance our ability to regulate our emotions and take some meaningful steps towards feeling safer in an unsafe world.

 

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Footnotes

[1] On animals' awareness of death:

• Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds (Bernd Heinrich, 2007)
  • I highly recommend this wonderful book, which covers a broad range of topics well beyond death and mortality.
• Behavioural reactions of elephants towards a dying and deceased matriarch (Ian Douglas-Hamilton, et al, Applied Animal Behavior Science, 2006)
• What the grieving mother orca tells us about how animals experience death (Jessica Pierce, The Conversation, 2018)

[2] What Took You So Long? by Sheldon Kopp

[3] On mindfulness:

• Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! (Mindfulness for Busy People)
  
• Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness (Jon Kabat-Zinn, 2007)
• Meditation Techniques for People Who Hate Meditation (Stephanie Vozza, Fast Company, 2014)
• 26 Scientifically Proven Superhuman Benefits of Meditation (Jon Brooks, ComfortPit, 2014)
• This is what eight weeks of mindfulness training does to your brain (Christian Jarrett, BPS Research Digest, 2016)
• Eight weeks to a better brain (Sue McGreevy, The Harvard Gazette, 2011)
• Changing Our Brains, Changing Ourselves (an interview with Richard Davidson)

[4] On exercise

• Get Moving! (Exercise for Busy People)
• Walking lifts your mood, even when you don't expect it to (Christian Jarrett, BPS Research Digest, 2016)
• The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer (Gretchen Reynolds)
• Need A Self-Control Boost? Get Outside (Jessica Stillman, Inc., 2014)

[5] On sleep:

• Great Leaders Sleep Well--Why Rest Is Critical for Success (Ronnie Hendel-Giller, 2018)
• There's a Proven Link Between Effective Leadership and Getting Enough Sleep (Nick van Dam and Els van der Helm, Harvard Business Review, 2016)
• You Can't Do Your Job if You Don't Sleep (Tony Schwartz, Harvard Business Review, 2012)
• Sleep-Deprived Leaders are Less Inspiring (Christopher Barnes, Harvard Business Review, 2016)
• Senior Leaders Get More Sleep Than Anyone Else (Rasmus Hougaard & Jacqueline Carter, Harvard Business Review, 2018)
• The Science of Sleep: Dreaming, Depression and How REM Sleep Regulates Negative Emotions (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, 2012)

[6] On chronic stress:

• Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success (Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness, 2017)
• Embracing Stress Is More Important Than Reducing Stress (Clifton Parker, 2015, discussing recent work by Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal)
• How to Make Stress Your Friend [14-minute video] (Kelly McGonigal, 2013)
• Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being (Linda Graham, 2013)

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For Further Reading

Taking the Leap (Dealing with Risk and Uncertainty)

How Leaders Create Safety (and Danger)

Safety, Trust, Intimacy

Taking the Plunge (Safety, Risk, Learning and Growth)

David Rock on Neuroscience, Leadership and the SCARF Model

Additional related resources can be found in the following sessions from the course I teach at Stanford, which I made freely available this Spring:

The Art of Self-Coaching (Public Course)

• Class 4: Emotion
• Class 5: Happiness
• Class 6: Resilience & Vulnerability

Photo by Mike.

It's Time to Stop Interviewing

While there's ample data on job interviews' poor ability to predict a candidate's success [1], the practice isn't going away any time soon. [2] But for most of my coaching clients--and for some of my MBA students--the era of interviewing in their lives is coming to an end. I don't mean that they'll stop participating in the process, but, rather, that they should begin to approach it from an entirely different perspective.

Up to a certain point in our careers, a job interview is often an exercise in fitting ourselves into a box, the size and shape of which is defined by the employer. We have a general understanding of the size and shape of the box--that's why we're interested in the job--but the precise details remain something of a mystery. And so the interview process consists largely of us gleaning additional clues about the size and shape of the box, while simultaneously proclaiming our ability to fit comfortably within it, no matter what we learn.

Later on, if we've landed the job and accepted the offer, we're not surprised that the employer wasn't entirely accurate about the size and shape of the box, in part because we weren't entirely accurate about our ability to fit into it comfortably. These inaccuracies need not be the result of deceit or dishonesty--it's simply that the information asymmetry inherent in the process means that neither party truly knows if it's going to be a good fit.

But when we contort ourselves to fit an employer's expectations of a candidate (or our imagined perceptions of those expectations), we perpetuate and even heighten that information asymmetry. By representing ourselves in this way, we increase the likelihood of false positives, in which one or both parties believe it will be a good fit, only to ultimately be proven wrong. As inefficient as this may be, there's an underlying logic here that makes sense early in our careers. At that stage of our professional lives, the cost of failing to win an offer for a compelling opportunity may seem quite high--and potentially much higher than the cost of finding ourselves in a job that's not a good fit.

And yet beyond a certain point, this calculus changes dramatically. The cost of taking a job that's not really a good fit becomes much higher than failing to obtain the offer in the first place. We may "win" the offer by successfully contorting ourselves to fit into the box (or at least convincing ourselves and our interviewers that it's a possibility), but in the process we've actually lost: We've lost time and attention we'll never regain. We've lost a chance to learn something useful about ourselves and the organization. And if we stick with this approach long enough, we lose the opportunity to understand who we really are and discover the work we're meant to do.

Most of my coaching clients are CEOs who expect to remain in their current position for the foreseeable future, but I do work with a number of clients through professional transitions. When this occurs, it often becomes apparent to my clients that they're past the point in their careers when there's any value to "winning" an offer by contorting themselves to fit into somebody else's box. At this stage my clients know that everyone involved in the process will gain the most if they simply show up as themselves, reduce the information asymmetry as soon as possible, and absolutely eliminate any chance of a false positive. This also shifts the power dynamic from one in which the company is interviewing the candidate to one in which both parties are interviewing each other.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we should show up at interviews with an obnoxious, take-it-or-leave-it attitude, or that we should be rigid and unyielding in what we require of prospective employers. Nor do I believe that there's one "perfect" job out there for us, and we should spurn anything that falls short. But in my experience the training we receive early in our careers to fit ourselves into other people's boxes far outlives its utility, and most of us wait far too long before realizing that it's time to stop interviewing this way.

The dilemma, of course, is that there's no single point in time when it's obvious that we should modify our approach to the process. You might object that this latter approach works for senior leaders who are sufficiently well-established and financially secure to walk away, and you don't feel like you're there yet. Fair enough--but when will you be? It's highly unlikely that any given professional milestone or accomplishment will automatically endow you with this attitude, and no one's going to tell you, "You're ready now--it's time." The only person who can make that call is you.

 

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Footnotes

[1] For more on the limitations of job interviews:

• The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews (Jason Dana, The New York Times, 2017)
• Belief in the unstructured interview: The persistence of an illusion (Jason Dana, Robyn Dawes and Nathanial Peterson, Judgment and Decision Making, 2013)
• How to Take the Bias Out of Interviews (Iris Bohnet, Harvard Business Review, 2016)
• Stubborn Reliance on Intuition and Subjectivity in Employee Selection (Scott Highhouse, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2008)

[2] Daniel Kahneman on Conducting Better Interviews

For Further Reading

Leadership and Authenticity

Cautionary Tales (Authenticity at Work)

Conform to the Culture Just Enough

Photo by Tim Evanson.